Re: OMA liaison statement on network APIs activities

On July 9, 2014 at 10:47:41 AM, Mark Baker (distobj@acm.org) wrote:
> > I spent some time looking over their latest efforts on the weekend.  
> Despite most of their APIs being described as "RESTful HTTP",  
> they
> aren't, and as a result their work has very little to do with the  
> Web.
>  
> You might want to respectfully suggest that they give this
> considerable attention;
>  
> http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven  

Problem with Roy's write-up is that it's unintelligible jargon :( I can't count the number of times I've read that post over the years and still can't make any sense beyond the first paragraph.

Consider: "What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period. Is there some broken manual somewhere that needs to be fixed?"

Now, I know I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer... but "on the notion that Hypertext is a constraint"? What does that mean? HTML can't be used? Can be used? Is he even talking about HTML? "The notion", is that a thing? 

"the engine of application state" - is that a browser? A server? A metaphysical concept? 

I could go on, but you get my point. It's little wonder that people don't really understand REST when its rules and design are not accessible to the average developer. 


-- 
Marcos Caceres

Received on Tuesday, 15 July 2014 22:05:05 UTC